Upgrading a server which had a single 19gb scsi drive. Added a 3ware sata raid card and two nice big fast sata drives. Tricky getting the correct disk array to boot, but finally succeeded.

Next: how to mount the old drive so the data can be migrated to the raid array. (I searched for some information about doing this and came up empty. Maybe I'm trying to do the impossible?)

The scsi drive is seen during hardware init, a device exists for it, and it shows up in LVM as a physical volume.

I created a logical volume (/dev/VolGroup00/development) and then tried to mount it. That's where things get strange. I'm using webmin but the same error happens at the commandline:

mount -t ext3 /dev/VolGroup00/development sda
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/VolGroup00/development,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

Also fails using ext2.

When I "edit logical volume" using webmin's LVM manager, webmin indicates that the partition is not initialized to a filesystem. Say what?

"Select a filesystem type and click this button to create a new filesystem on this logical volume. This will erase any data currently on the volume."

One thing that might be worth noting: the disk label of the 19gb scsi drive was "boot". I had to change it to "boot1" in order to update to FC5 (the original RAID array had RH4).

It's not terribe if the data is lost - i made backups - but since I didn't fdisk this drive I'm thinking that the error is related to something else.

This article (called Recovery of RAID and LVM2 Volumes) might help, http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8874
It mentions that if you use the default name for the LVM and try to mount that disk in another machine with the same default name, it will not work. Read the article for how they got around this problem.

the easiest way to do it is to switch back to your old configuration, and copy everything on the old drives to a nother sever, then put in your new hardware and copy it back.